BY ANNE CROWLEY
WHAT THE EXPERTS SAID
Flesh is the 2025 Booker Prize Winner. “A propulsive, hypnotic novel … spare and penetrating, Flesh asks profound questions about what drives a life: what makes it worth living, and what breaks it.
“Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour – a married woman close to his mother’s age – as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand and life soon spirals out of control.
“As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards … with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.” Penguin Books. penguin.com.au
MY THOUGHTS
The focus throughout the book is on the physical, the transactional. Whether through emotionally distant ‘intimate’ encounters or life-changing events, these are expressed by actions rather than emotions. Istvan is a fascinating character!
His dialogue is sparse and it seems his thoughts are too, or at least, at times he finds them elusive! When later he does grasp them, he often seems surprised, puzzled. “Something, however, makes it hard for him to start the engine and drive away, which is what he thought he was going to do… He has a strange feeling that something very significant has happened, only he isn’t sure what.”
Istvan’s most common response in situations ranging from invitations to have sex to job offers and mega property deals is “Okay”. “He doesn’t know why he says that. Some part of him seems to want to.”
“He doesn’t know why he does what he does next. Something wells up in him. It feels as purely physical and involuntary as throwing up. There’s a surprisingly loud sound and the door has a splintery dent in it now.”
I loved this book! I enjoyed the pace through use of ‘rubber time’ – skipping across the surface of long periods then deep-diving into detail, over the course of a life of many chapters – which made for a quick and absorbing read. Often there is a building tension suggesting things are about to go wrong – and they do, but not quite as and when expected.
The language is trimmed of excess: “The first daffodils arrive in a hostile world.” And the abrupt and unsentimental reference to major life milestones and disasters some interval after the fact, takes your breath away – yet still there is little reflection on any accompanying emotions – at least not until much later.
I thoroughly recommend Flesh, though prepare for detailed references to sex and use of coarse language.
